Advices, I believe, to young men—and to all men—are very seldom much
valued. There is a great deal of advising and very little faithful
performing. And talk that does not end in any kind of action is better
suppressed altogether. I would not therefore go much into advising; but
there is one advice I must give you. It is, in fact, the summary of all
advices, and you have heard it a thousand times, I dare say; but I must,
nevertheless, let you hear it the thousand and first time, for it is
most intensely true, whether you will believe it at present or
not—namely, that above all things the interest of your own life depends
upon being diligent now, while it is called to-day, in this place where
you have come to get education.
Diligent! That includes all virtues in it that a student can have; I
mean to include in it all qualities that lead into the acquirement of
real instruction and improvement in such a place. If you will believe
me, you who are young, yours is the golden season of life. As you have
heard it called, so verily it is the seed-time of life, in which if you
do not sow, or if you sow tares instead of wheat, you cannot expect to
reap well afterwards, and you will arrive at, indeed, little, while in
the course of years, when you come to look back, and if you have not
done what you have heard from your advisers—and among many counsellors
there is wisdom—you will bitterly repent when it is too late.
At the season when you are in young years the whole mind is, as it were,
fluid, and is capable of forming itself into any shape that the owner of
the mind pleases to order it to form itself into. The mind is in a fluid
state, but it hardens up gradually to the consistency of rock or iron,
and you cannot alter the habits of an old man, but as he has begun he
will proceed and go on to the last.
By diligence, I mean among other things—and very chiefly—honesty in
all your inquiries into what you are about. Pursue your studies in the
way your conscience calls honest. More and more endeavor to do that.
Keep, I mean to say, an accurate separation of what you have really come
to know in your own minds, and what is still unknown. Leave all that on
the hypothetical side of the barrier, as things afterwards to be
acquired, if acquired at all; and be careful not to stamp a thing as
known only when it is stamped on your mind, so that you may survey it on
all sides with intelligence.
There is such a thing as a man endeavoring to persuade himself, and
endeavoring to persuade others, that he knows about things when he does
not know more than the outside skin of them, and he goes flourishing
about with them. There is also a process called cramming—that is,
getting up such points of things as the examiner is likely to put
questions about. Avoid all that as entirely unworthy of an honorable
habit.
Be modest and humble, and diligent in your attention to what your
teachers tell you, who are profoundly interested in trying to bring you
forward in the right way, as far as they have been able to understand
it. Try all things they set before you, in order, if possible, to
understand them, and to value them in proportion to your fitness for
them. Gradually see what kind of work you can do; for it is the first of
all problems for a man to find out what kind of work he is to do in this
universe. In fact, morality as regards study is, as in all other things,
the primary consideration, and overrides all others. A dishonest man
cannot do anything real; and it would be greatly better if he were tied
up from doing any such thing. He does nothing but darken counsel by the
words he utters. That is a very old doctrine, but a very true one; and
you will find it confirmed by all the thinking men that have ever lived
in this long series of generations of which we are the latest.
One remark about your reading. I do not know whether it has been
sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When
a man is reading on any kind of subject, in most departments of
books—in all books, if you take it in a wide sense—you will find that
there is a division of good books and bad books—there is a good kind of
book and a bad kind of book. I am not to assume that you are all
ill-acquainted with this; but I may remind you that it is a very
important consideration at present. It casts aside altogether the idea
that people have that if they are reading any book—that if an ignorant
man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all.
I entirely call that in question. I even venture to deny it. It would be
much safer and better, would he have no concern with books at all than
with some of them. There are a number, an increasing number, of books
that are decidedly to him not useful. But he will learn also that a
certain number of books were written by a supreme, noble kind of
people—not a very great number—but a great number adhere more or less
to that side of things. In short, as I have written it down somewhere
else, I conceive that books are like men’s souls—divided into sheep and
goats. Some of them are calculated to be of very great advantage in
teaching—in forwarding the teaching of all generations. Others are
going down, down, doing more and more, wilder and wilder mischief.
And for the rest, in regard to all your studies here, and whatever you
may learn, you are to remember that the object is not particular
knowledge—that you are going to get higher in technical perfections,
and all that sort of thing. There is a higher aim lies at the rear of
all that, especially among those who are intended for literary, for
speaking pursuits—the sacred profession. You are ever to bear in mind
that there lies behind that, the acquisition, of what may be called
wisdom—namely, sound appreciation and just decision as to all the
objects that come round about you, and the habit of behaving with
justice and wisdom. In short, great is wisdom—great is the value of
wisdom. It cannot be exaggerated. The highest achievement of
man—“Blessed is he that getteth understanding.” And that, I believe,
occasionally may be missed very easily; but never more easily than now,
I think. If that is a failure, all is a failure.—_Carlyle._